f13.net

Got bounced to this link while looking for something else.  Amusing.

http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2003/04/22fellowship.html

Duh--they weren't the best race for playing a thief in D&D for nothing!

I will admit that was funny as hell, heheh.

Except for climbing walls -- they sucked at that.

1. There were no Hobbits in D&D... They were Halflings, and Hobbits were exclusive to Middle Earth another pen and paper type game. Essentially the same, but different nomenclature.

2. I am guessing that in order to conduct this dicussion, both needed to partake of some Hobbit-like pipe smoking.

I like the part where Zinn refers to Aragorn as a "drug lord." I'm not too big on Lord of the Rings, but their take certainly makes it more interesting to me.

There were Hobbits in (A)D&D until the Tolkien estate made TSR change it (but they allowed TSR to use Halfling).

And it's important to note that "Hobbit" was what they called themselves, Halfling was actually the "world" name for the race :P

So, yes, there are no hobbits in D&D.

Edit: NM

This thread had potential to be funny.

Jeez.  It started off so well.

I still think it's funny that Taolurker felt he needed to explain to everyone about hobbits and halflings and D&D. That could very well be the new definition of nerdrage.

"HOW DARE YOU SUGGEST HOBBITS WERE IN D&D, THEY WERE HALFLINGS!. You don't become a thief of 25 seasons you if you can't understand the fundamental differences between halflings and hobbits!

I think it's funny that some of you think that Chomsky and Zinn actually wrote that.

Hadn't seen this in years, thanks for the archaeological find.

 :oops:

I have no idea who they are.

I looked them up. Basically they are liberal anti-war, anti-government professors. Chomsky is also a huge linguistics theorist and grammarian. It sparked my memory that I read some of Chomsky's stuff in a college course, but they both seem like Major Buzzkillington.

Zinn is also a noted socialist.  Had to read some of his writing in high school.

Chomsky is not also a huge linguistics theorist. He is primarily a huge linguistics theorist.


It wouldn't be funny so much as deeply worrying. And that's without going to the site and.. well.. seeing the authors listed.


I found it enjoyable and hadn't seen it before.

I enjoyed it, though read anything else on the site and it becomes apparent it ain't 100% factual (it includes someone apologizing to Iceland for his dictatorial rule featuring such acts as forbidding them to use the letter T.)

And yeah, Chomsky made his name as a Linguist with his whole theory of Universal grammar, etc. I took a course last year and am studying this year under a professor who is a huge Neo-chomskian language philosopher who ties it into bio-linguistics and even metaphysics. I get to hear a lot about Chomsky.

He's better known to the general public for books like Manufacturing Consent.

He's pretty much the only linguistics academic who's name I know off the top of my head, while I can think of many left wing authors, so I order him the other way around.

Plus it doesn't hurt to inform people that despite what one might think of his politics he is hugely influential in a role they might not know much about.

You  might want to check out Bertrand Russel or Wittgenstein.  It's been a few years since my last philosophy course, but I remember them dealing a lot with the nature of language.  And I'm pretty sure Leibniz may have written something on the topic as well.

Zinn wrote The People's History of the United States, a great book. McSweeney's is famous for A Hilarious Essay by A Famous Person, totally not written by that person.

They come under Philosophy first, not linguistics. (Current Philosophy Major).

I want to see Chomsky and Carlin get into a slapping match at the library.

I was under the impression that particular branches of philosophy deal very much in linguistics.  Or was it the nature of language?  Fuck if I can remember, that was at least two years ago.

Russell and Wittgenstein deal far more with the nature of language and questions such as what is meaning. Russell does a lot of the more classic stuff such as the what names are and other concepts important to logic. Quine and Skinner are also quite well known (Both behaviourists who believe language is entirely learned through our exposure to it as a complex input/output thing). Chomsky goes more in for theories of how we actually use language in general rather than specific philosophical problems (though he does quite a bit of that too).

Those philosophers are certainly more traditional for language and up until last year was what the course was about. Last year I rocked up for the first lecture which was on Descartes and ideas of language as a feature of human creativity and mindedness. It's certainly a very different approach and certainly interesting seeing somewhat more mainstream ideas get attacked. He also focused a lot on language as a product of evolution and what the great evolutionary difference is between us and other animals that allows our language faculty to exist and what purpose language serves.

I used to read a lot of philosophical literature, but ironically, Wittgenstein was and is the hardest to understand.

I did, however, understand him enough that I gave up thinking about philosophy, religion...pretty much the whole shebang.. That talking about is, for the most part, complete fucking nonsense. For that I'm grateful.

Nope.  Still not funny.

Sorry for messing up ur thred.

(http://img148.imageshack.us/img148/1180/2000035887522228730rske2.jpg)

It was pretty unfunny by the time you got here, so don't worry about it.

Zinn: The Orcs have no resources. They're desperate.

Chomsky: Desperate people driven to do desperate things.

Zinn: Desperate to compete with the economic powerhouses of Rohan and Gondor.

i lolled

Carlin is less pedantic, and has a finer wit... but Chomsky is faster on his feet. Noam would run George raw rhetorically, with only an occasional zinger (probably originally penned in 1975) flung the other way. People go out and have random political conversations with Chomsky, transcribe them, and then sell those transcripts as books because they're more interesting than the popular journalism on the subject.

So he's out... but Carlin and Zinn are at about the same speed. Not a slapping match, perhaps, but it'd be fun to watch them tag-team troll the F13 Politics forum.

I don't know. I took a linguistics course in college and we had to watch a video which starred both of them. Ironically, it was probably made around 1975, but I have a feeling that putting them both in the same room would be fantastic, like fireworks and cotton candy.

Carlin's smart, and there'd be fireworks, but it wouldn't be rapid-fire hilarious. When he's not monologuing Carlin gets very serious and the humor turns to exasperation. To complement Chomsky you'd need somebody better at improvisation... Robin Williams, Dennis Miller, or Jon Stewart, for example. Has Jon ever interviewed the old man? That'd be sweet fluff and ground blooming flowers.

Without derailing this thread, I'll just note that Michael Kazin published aa thoughtful, impressive refutation (http://dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=385) of Zinn's People's History in the liberal journal Dissent a few years back.  Those who've never read People's History can also get a good sense of it from that article.

As for arguing with Chomsky, I (unintentionally) got the chance to go back and forth with him for about 15 minutes a couple of years back, on the topic of Hugo Chavez's governance in Venezuela.  It ended with him comparing me to Stalin.  When I objected, he amended it to comparing me to John Adams, saying I'd "probably like the sound of it better but it's the same thing in principle."

Why Adams was like Stalin... (http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0616-03.htm)